Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,

I am writing this petition letter regarding having my Art History 120 outcome removed from my cumulative GPA. My grades in that class were not up to the standard that I desired them to be, and this highly affected my GPA. Due to this, I will not qualify to be in my desired or to be on the pending list of my desired major when the time comes in June. During the Winter Term, when there were two major examinations in this class and Slide Tests, my focus and efforts were unfortunately directed elsewhere. I live in Vancouver when I am not at Queens and I try to fly back and forth the least amount of time as it generally takes me a while to recover both from jet lag and from flying in general. During the beginning of the Winter Term, my Grandmother, who lives with me at home with me and my father, got sick. She has been sick in the past as well but as she gets older she needs more help. My Father works full-time and has to travel out of the province or country frequently for work, so during the Winter Term Break I helped at home as much as I could. However, I had to return to my studies as I am a full-time student. During the first Slide Test of the Winter Term, I studied as best as I could but my focus was completely directed to other areas, I was on calls with my Grandmothers doctors a lot of the time because English is not her first language and I would have to ensure that the right things were getting communicated. Because of this, unfortunately, I missed some seminars in the Art History course which detrimentally affected my knowledge of the course. I had to travel back during the one-week break we had during February and unfortunately, on my travels back there were storm conditions that made me miss one of the last seminars that we had before the final slide test. With all these factors at play, that were out of my control, my ability to perform at my best capacity for this class was affected. On one of the first essays I had gotten an A, as I consider writing to be one of my strong suits, but because of the recent events in my family the next essay I had written my mark moved down to a D. Personally I do not consider a D to by my standard of writing, and I believe that several outside factors had a huge role to play in this mark. I tried reaching out to more family members for help with what was happening at home, but it was very difficult for people to come every day to the house and ensure that my Grandmother was alright. Due to this, I had to reach out via phone call to check in and this impacted my focus on school. Eventually, in March, there was someone back home who was able to step up and be a caretaker, allowing me to focus more so on my academics and my grades. I had thought I would be able to recover, but too much damage had already been done and the percentages could not exactly recover. With all these facts, I realize I could have simply told someone that I was a full-time student and that I could not be responsible for looking after someone, but at the time I thought that I had the ability to juggle both helping my Grandmother and focusing on my studies. I had joined study groups during the time thinking group studies might help and studied the content of the course as much as I could but all in all it was not enough to help me pass the course.
I have done history courses in the past in my school's IB program which helped me pass my other courses because most of them involved content I was already familiar with. However, this was the first Art History course that I had ever taken and the information was all very new to me. This made it much harder to try and understand while under these circumstances.
With all of this, I was hoping that the grade could be removed from my cumulative GPA count or that I could be provided with an extra assignment to help boost my GPA. I understand that as a university student, there are responsibilities that come with looking after your own studies and ensuring that you are getting all of the help that is accessible and I promise I tried and am still currently trying to do the best at my academics as I can. I fully plan to retake this class or a variation of it in the future as it is an interest that I have and I would love to have the time to learn from this content in a future term.

Thank you for your time,

Simrit Dhillon

For further reference, I can provide a professional letter from a doctor stating the time devoted and the stress caused because of the situation. Our family doctor is currently on vacation until Tuesday but she is more than willing to write a professional letter to support this once she is back in the office.